The present invention relates to a workstation system and method for use with digitized medical imagery, particularly digitized mammograms, and, more particularly, to an interface system and method for providing a desired display form of the mammogram to a user.
The imminent arrival of digital mammography brings with it a set of issues that must be resolved in order to make the technology easy to adapt to and therefore successful. New techniques must be developed to present the information to the radiologists effectively.1-5 Moreover, any software written to assist diagnosis in digital mammography must be evaluated by radiologists before it can be deemed useful. Evaluation is usually done with receiver operating characteristic (ROC) experiments the design of which should consider and find remedies for possible reading biases.6 Differences between monitor and viewbox reading of mammograms can introduce significant biases in an ROC study.
A review of the existing literature on display workstations indicates that the problem of displaying full digital mammograms for primary diagnosis is a continuing issue.2 Commercial systems exist for several modalities that generate digital data including magnetic resonance imaging (MRI), computed tomography (CT), chest radiography, ultrasound, and nuclear medicine.7 Current commercial workstations for digital mammography are used in stereotactic biopsy systems8 or for CAD reporting on low-resolution images, while primary diagnosis is done from original films.5 Hence, applications involving full, high-resolution digital mammogram review have had to resort to in-house development of the required display system.3 
It is thus an object of the present invention to provide a workstation interface for such applications that is designed in a way that is not technically intrusive.
It is another object to provide such a workstation interface that is comparable to the existing standard reading procedure.
It is a further object to provide such a workstation interface that provides all the advantages of currently available technology.
It is an additional object to develop a workstation interface for evaluating CAD methods for digital mammography in ROC experiments.
Another object is to provide software that is as natural and intuitive to use by radiologists as possible.
A further object is to provide such software that is open and flexible to permit easy changes and/or additions and allow usage not only as a clinical tool, but also as an educational or training tool.
These and other objects of the present invention are achieved by the present invention, a system and method for providing an interface between a medical image and a user. The system comprises means for establishing electronic communication with a processor for receiving a stored digitized medical image comprising data representative of a plurality of greyscale values. Further the system includes means for communicating with a display means, such as a monitor. Software means that are loadable into the processor comprise means for receiving a signal from a user-operable device and means controllable by a signal from the user-operable device for transforming the image into a plurality of varying-resolution forms, each form having a different set of greyscale values. In addition, the software means comprises means for displaying the forms on the display means, each form displayed within a different sector of the display means.